We have clearly been psyching ourselves up for joke-compatible computers for a long time, so it's no wonder that real AI researchers are on the case. Some specialists even see humor as the final frontier for artificial intelligence, because it requires mastery of sophisticated functions like self-awareness, empathy, spontaneity, and linguistic subtlety.

Of course, therein lies the challenge. "Anything that is inherently human is always very difficult to translate into a computer," Julia Taylor, a professor at Purdue Polytechnic and an expert on computational humor, told me over the phone.

"From the psychological point of view, we are not quite sure what it takes," she said. "What kind of sense of humor will people have? What is appropriate; what is not appropriate? Maybe today, you will appreciate joke X but two days from now, you won't appreciate it anymore. What are the characteristics of this appreciation? What is it that is going to make us find something funny or not?"

"All of those difficulties are there before you can actually get an AI type humor."